Alexander Gradsky - Unofficial site

By working with blank verse, rhymed in the absence of the usual completeness, there is enought to confusion - but it is rather Gradsky even encourages, gives an opportunity to play with non-standard «Neshlyagernymi» melodic solutions... Read more - Songs on the music and arrangement. So, it all started with the «Skomorokhov» in 1966, where you played with Gradsky, Buynova and Shakhnazarov. What began themselves «Skomorokhs»? and the music!

Russian songs byAlexander Gradsky

Arkady Petrov

Club and amateur

1978

I do not know what a miracle can lead to procure these records, but the fact remains that this 17-minute cycle has played on many disco parties. I remember well, looked like listening to the program suite Gradsky disco Kharkov Palace of Pioneers named Pavlik Morozov in the summer of this year: concentrated, detached entity listeners ringing silence, in which "played out" effect of the suite. The organizers of the evening added to the music of an improvised lighting design, but, as I recall, the majority of those present in the hall almost no attention to him, but just listen to songs, songs, deeply and sincerely to "worrying." . . Then the cycle was over, the traditional start of the dance, a dance number after another, but still a long, long time no one just did not want to dance. The emotional charge of the «Russian songs» was so strong that we can say, "bleached" and destroyed every other expressiveness of the music, which happened that night in a random temporal proximity with them.

Introduction to the modern youth stage elements of folk music - songs of famous (and sometimes new to a wide audience), songs, folk harmonies, melodic flourishes - ornaments, podgolosochnoy polyphony - it was natural and inevitable. But to achieve true organic alloy of "popular" with the "entertainers" was little. Golden Key from the treasure folk music (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Uzbek - in other words, any) I could not get in your hands. However, arrangements of folk songs and instrumental tunes set to appear, but most of all, it was still not an alloy, as mechanically typed sum-folk tune of "superimposed" on the bit-model running rhythms. This arithmetic is not given a new quality. Moreover, they often lead to breaches of rules characteristic of folklore. Simplified harmonies, "averaged" rhythmic and intonational whimsicality of folk songs, a broad, freely flowing melody is forced to drive the chetyrehdolnye (so-called square) the scope of modern pop rhythms.

I can not say that our vocal and instrumental ensembles in the area suffered only defeats. There have been and good luck. Worked fine with the folk songs of Minsk "Pesnyary", Chelyabinsk ensemble of "Ariel." One of his recent works, "Ariel" - LP-Suite "Russian Pictures", recorded in the summer of 1976 showed that music bright, colorful, exciting, but at the same time, cool in its emotional tone. Processing Valeria Yarushina and his colleagues in the ensemble have also proved that success in the approach to folk art is not imitation ethnographism, not the mere copying of the national and the free co-creation, in the sense of the truth of life, that life itself, which has created a priceless treasure - Russian song.

And, by the autumn of 1977 is over, another work based on the free use of Russian folk material - "Russian Song" by Alexander Gradsky.

In autumn 1975, Alexander, already a graduate of the Gnessin Institute in vocal once again sits at the student's desk. He passed on the composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory with Professor TN Khrennikov. In addition, he has to attend a number of general academic lectures. Including a course that was for him a genuine discovery: folk music. This course led an outstanding expert on folklore, Professor Anna V. Rudnev.

Among the targets were also workshops on writing and interpretation of folk melodies. In March 1976 Gradskij writes on Ryazanschine and Bryansk songs (three of them will be used in its cycle). In addition, he is working on deciphering the "foreign" tape recordings (in folklore study conservatory is kept tens of thousands of records, some of them are used as a "practical benefits").

That's how Alexander opens up a whole unknown to him before a musical continent. Previously, he judged the folk song that only a relatively limited set of records that were heard in radio and television. Now he heard the genuine, "unedited" rustic singing.

To the depths experienced many of the songs, I realized that song for the popular stories of performers totally real, it's stories about real people and real events. He was shocked by the wealth of "music technology" folk melodies of their pattern, rhythm, and variability of the meter and harmony, articulation, by the language of songs, a special style of singing vowels and consonants, even ...

Gradsky comes to mind is a paradoxical thought: between the old Russian village songs and modern sound of rock music a lot in common.

First of all - nepriglazhennost. What has disappeared from the "ordinary" pop song - brightness contrast, the power of sound, contrasting emotional poles.

It seemed also that rock music in its approach to the Russian song, according to her understanding can come much closer to folklore than various academic treatment. For the rock is characterized by "simple vocalization," a simple sound making without the "pop" effect, the use of "white sound". However, the folk song: white sound, open singing, expressive.

Avarice of the depth of feeling. Some kind of incredible simplicity in the presentation of content. "In short, as if incidentally speaks of serious, sometimes global issues. Speak strongly, but without any affectation.

Gradsky selects from Ryazan and Bryansk their records and material, with whom he met while working on academic transcripts, several of these songs could have sung purely in the national and at the same time, in the manner of a modern beat. Find something that would be common for them. He finds four of these tunes. Attaches to it the fifth - "Nothing in Polya does not move." The song, a favorite from childhood. So there is a series of "Russian Song".

The basis of its sound the same, in the first place is not so much a musical as text. Melodies are not kept or were used everywhere freely. Some of them stayed only a rhythm - introduced new tone. In short, melodic songs sometimes just getting to the author's original impulse, a springboard. But the texts he sought to preserve in all its archaic beauty, with a surprisingly poetic-sounding "wrong". For example:

fog, mist of oak ...

Or p>

you, comrade, sing, sing,

I liked your voice ...

And Gradsky, just following the anonymous folk artist, gives a folksy version:

you, comrade, vaspoy, vaspoy,

Pondravilsya me your Golas! ..

These "wrong" for a folk singer, and organic and correct. Especially because of stress in the folk songs freely changed. Once the "voice", the other - "Golas". In one verse of "white", as follows - "white". And this way and that - right ...

First part of the cycle - "Nothing in the Polya. . . "Version is very well known, remembered more for the implementation of the sisters Fedorov. This entry into the composition, the introduction of "in its atmosphere" at the usual stuff. The material is familiar, but is constructed from Gradsky the new syntax. The task - to create an elegiac mood with a gradual dramatization of the end of the song. The story is revealed slowly. But somewhere inside, the second plan, there is anxiety, apprehension. And when the words of

We'll live happily even better than everyone,

We love each other better than before ...

they do not believe it until the end. There is hardly a "different" would be better.

Second part - "Suffering." Well, there is little "theater", a comic chastushechny story played out in their faces. A man goes through the village - and the incident in this regard. In the recording of the song used in a variety of village noises - the dog is barking, whispering gossips, bleating goat, bull grunts. Noises follow each other after each chastushechnogo pranks, hence a sense of movement. In performing the song Gradsky uses different kinds of melodic ornaments - mordent, glissando, even using a "double sound" (like the Tuvan singers), which makes it particularly humorous effect:

How many years razdushkoy knew -

Parted at last year-and-a-while ...

Song to "defuse the situation" after the concentrated "Polya" and prepare for the dramatic, "Tanya White." This is - a humorous sketch, a little musical animation.

Third part - "Tanya White." Why white? Blonde, I guess. Or maybe just a pale girl: in the village after several other canons of beauty than in the city, there to honor all the more rosy girl. White face, black eyebrows - as said before, if a girl wanted to highlight, to show her otherness. This round dance song - "tanochnaya" as they say in Bryansk.

Round Dance is a snake. To lead the front, back and all the other dancers are. In the recording, which was used by the young composer, the song ends happily - there is a guy, "Voevodin's son," who says: "I am Tanya love you, take for yourself!" But we know that in other embodiments, there is a tragic ending. Find the text of this version Gradsky failed, and then, starting with the fourth verse, he wrote him a missing plot device:

Deceived Tanya Voevodin's son,

Tanya, Tanya, Tanya White ... , etc.

Rhythm and the entire accompaniment of this song is on synth "Synth-100" in a Moscow studio of electronic music. The rhythmic figure of the people is taken, the well-known "topotushka" entitled "The three legs».

Fourth part - "Archangel wedding cry».

Dramatic tale of unrequited love lost on Tanya White brings us to the "cries" the fourth song. But crying is nevsamdelishnym, imaginary - mourned not human life, but only The past girlhood. So in the old days they mourned were married and going to the house of a married bride:

Oh yes it is a nightingale rolled,

Oh yes it is wheel rolled

Deve Thy habitation carefree! ..

In this part, the author sings entirely without instrumental accompaniment (a cappella), sings for all the characters at once (multiple-entry was made by way of blending). In the film, folklore study that inspired it, was as follows: three or four old women's voices chanted in unison motive, something close to the ancient epic melodies, and a woman (mourner) expressive "call out" in the high register.

Text unison ensemble laments parse film was almost impossible, but the text of the soloist, mourners listened very well.

In its "reconstruction" of crying Gradsky takes the ground floor of sonority (lamentation) as a technique where several voices in unison, repeating the same popevku: motive, he is writing his own, borrowing from the original only a mood, coloration of sound and performing style.

Part fifth and while the latter: "At Midsummer." So far - it's because the author's intention is to continue the cycle has two parts.The song seems to be valiant, but the plot is again dismal:

On Midsummer! On Midsummer!

Gaumont, chattering in a dark forest,

fog, mist of oak ...

Brother sister wants to ruin! ..

But my sister does not want to part with life in the damp forest thicket, and she asks:

My Brother,

Do not destroy me in the dark forest,

ruined me in the open field! ..

Folk singer in the recording, the decoded Gradsky, tells the tragic story of this very dispassionately and objectively. Just execute it and the author of treatment. But in contrast to the vocal instrumental, using a synthesizer, a very dramatic: tools like commenting on the tragic content of the song, its very interesting elements of modal variability and unusual rock semidolnym meter. P>

... "Russian Song" - the cycle has not yet been sounded on the stage, but already recorded for the All-Union Radio, performed by the author, Alexander Gradsky (vocals, guitar, synthesizer), Yuri Ivanov (bass guitar), Yuri Fokine (drums) and Sergei Zenko (flute, saxophone, flute village).